Nobody Has Solved This Cryptographic Puzzle for 30 Years. Think You Can? – Popular Mechanics

Imagine walking past a 12-foot-tall scroll covered in seemingly nonsensical letters every day for 30 years and wondering just what the hell it actually means. That's probably how it feels to be the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employees who regularly pass by the infamous Kryptos sculpture in the courtyard of the bureau's headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

Kryptos, devised by artist Jim Sanborn, has been around for nearly three decades, and yet no one has figured out what the full message says, let alone cracked the underlying riddle. Even the National Security Agency (NSA) could only decrypt part of the code.

Now, just months before a dedication ceremony in November to celebrate the copper scroll's 30 years of stumping experts, Sanborn has released a third and final clue to help hobbyistswho easily number in the thousands, based on activity in code-cracking forumsfigure out what the remaining, unsolved 97-character passage says.

But Sanborn says unscrambling that phrase won't exactly lead you to a quick victory. It's really just the end of step one.

"It's a 97-character phrase," he told NPR. "And that phrase is in itself a riddle. It's mysterious. It's going to lead to something else. It's not going to be finished when it's decoded.

As for the clue itself? It's one word: NORTHEAST.

In 1990, sculptors first erected Kryptos. At about 12 feet tall and 20 feet long, the now-greenish copper structure offers up some 240 square feet of frustration to all of the CIA employees and codebreakerslike video game developer and cryptologist Elonka Duninwho set eyes on it.

Dunin is a master cryptographer and runs a helpful and in-depth website all about Kryptos. (She's cracked so many codes that Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code, even named a character in that book after her.) According to her site, Kryptos contains a series of punched-out letters in a metal structure, is made up of thousands of characters, and shows four total messages.

There are actually several various parts to Kryptos, all scattered around the CIA headquarters. There's the ultra-famous copper scroll, which contains nearly 1,800 encrypted characters. It's next to a petrified tree and a circular pool. Then there are several sheets of copper, embossed with Morse Code, and sandwiched between granite slabs. A nearby landscaped area includes more granite slabs and a duck pond. Finally, there's an engraved compass with a needle pointing at a lodestone, a naturally magnetized form of magnetite rock.

Sanborn received a bit of help from Edward Scheidt, a retired chairman of the CIA's cryptographic center, to come up with the codes for each passage. The Kryptos message contains a partial guide to the code's solution inside the panels of the sculpture.

Thanks to two prior clues from Sanborn in 2010 and 2014, the first three passages have been solved by the likes of NSA employees and James Gillogly, a computer scientist, but the final 97-character portion still eludes experts.

"It is considered to be one of the most famous unsolved codes of the world," Dunin said in a documentary interview. "Here we are going on 30 years, and it still hasn't been cracked."

University of California San Diego

The first portion of the Kryptos puzzle is a poetic phrase, written by Sanborn, himself:

Sanborn says that the misspelling of "illusion" as "iqlusion" was intentional, to make it tougher for cryptographers to decode.

In the second phrase, the exact latitude and longitude of the CIA headquarters is pointed out, and something buried is hinted at:

Apparently "W.W." is a reference to William Webster, who headed the CIA when the sculpture was first unveiled in 1990. Sanborn allegedly gave him a key to decipher the code.

In the third section, there are lines from archaeologist Howard Carter's diary, describing a door opening into King Tut's tomb. Note that there are more misspellings:

Karl Wang, a student at the University of California San Diego who created a page with the solutions, says the third passage is much more difficult to crack than the prior two.

"The first two parts are straight-forward enough that nearly anybody with a simple education in cryptography can solve them," he said on his page. "The third part is much more advanced, and the fourth part is borderline impossible."

Gillogly was the first to publicly announce a solution for the first three parts, which he completed with a computer attack in 1999, according to Dunin's website. Afterward, the CIA said its own analyst, David Stein, had also solved those first three parts, but had done so a year prior with paper and pencil.

Two years after Stein's solution was announced, the NSA claimed it had a team that solved parts one through three all the way back in 1992, but kept mum. Still, no one has cracked part four.

To solve the first two passages, codebreakers used vigenere, which is what cryptologists call a polyalphabetic substitution cipher system. It means multiple alphabets are used to encrypt one message. Created in the 16th century by cryptographer Giovan Battista Bellaso, the scheme was easy to create, but excruciatingly hard to crack. It wasn't until nearly 300 years later that a vigenere cipher was first solved, leading the French to call it "le chiffre indchiffrable," or "the indecipherable cipher." Today, people mostly use computers to crack these codes.

To solve part four, Dunin and other cryptologists have tried every method at their disposal, from polyalphabetic substitution to transposition. No such luck. Now, with three clues in hand, "BERLIN," CLOCK," and "NORTHEAST," it's your turn.

Here are the materials you should peruse to get ahead in solving the final Kryptos cipher:

Unsolved!

When you think you have the answer right, head to Sanborn's website, where you can find the best way to contact him to see if your solution is correct. Right now, it's an email process that costs $50 per entry.

If all else fails, don't get too hard on yourself. "Kryptos" is Greek for "hidden," and it looks like the answers to this puzzle might well be tucked away for another 30 yearsor at least until Sanborn dies and eventually auctions off the solution to the code. He told The New York Times that any of the money raised through an auction will go to climate science.

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Nobody Has Solved This Cryptographic Puzzle for 30 Years. Think You Can? - Popular Mechanics